In this episode of Developing Leadership, we kick off our deep-dive series on different Engineering Leadership roles.

Jason and Eiso discuss how CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and Engineering Managers should navigate through the various stages of their company. From prioritizing at different seed rounds to developing a go-to-market strategy, building their company’s architecture, and the day-to-day of each of these roles.

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Get the full transcript here

Jason's Tweet which inspired this episode series:

https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner/status/1418983921895628801?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July

Here are a few of our favorite moments from the conversation


Engineering, in general, is not well understood. How you build high-performance engineering teams, how you structure them, how you execute, all of those things. It's just not that well understood. It's much more well understood in Sales. We talk about the difference between Sales and Engineering, which are the two largest orgs at most organizations. Sales feel so different from Engineering. Engineering feels very much like a team sport where at the end of the day, there's a singular trophy that's held up and the entire engineering team is holding it. But sales feels more like everyone's on a track and field team.

One of the things I appreciate most about really high-functioning Sales organizations, is the lack of ambiguity brings about transparency, but also honesty, a direct honesty, which is, "Hey, you're not hitting your quota, what's wrong?" And it all becomes about a bit of personal accountability. And in Engineering it is easy to diffuse it from personal responsibility or accountability to the team. This is appropriate in many cases, but it can be abused too.

Don't expect people to adapt to your way of giving information. Part of your job, if you're a leader who's basically trying to lubricate the organization and make it work better, is to understand that you likely have to do a lot more adapting than other people will ever adapt to you.

A CTO is the most important role in early-stage companies. And I'm not going to even say the CEO is, I will not say that. The CTO is the most important person in early-stage companies. And the reason why I think that to be the case is that they're the ones that are making the most 10-year-bet decisions. If you're unwinding a decision 10 years from now, it's coming from the CTO in the early stage.